Chapter 15 015

Chapter 15 015

DARIUS

I couldn't sleep.

I'd tried. Lay there for an hour staring at the ceiling before I gave up and got up and went back to the study. Poured a drink I didn't really want and sat in the chair by the window and looked out at the dark grounds.

The house was completely quiet. Everyone else was out. Rhen and Cole had left after Nicholas's car disappeared down the drive. Cora had gone to bed hours ago. Meira's light had gone off before eleven.

Just me and the dark and everything turning over in my head.

I kept coming back to what she'd said at the door.

Your father would be proud of what you built.

I didn't know why it had landed the way it did. I'd heard plenty of things said about what I'd built. Rhen had told me once that my father would have been stunned by it, the territory, the standing, all of it. That hadn't done anything to me. Just words.

But the way she'd said it. Standing in the doorway with her hand on the frame, not asking for anything, not performing it. Just saying it and leaving.

Like she meant it. Like she'd looked at what she knew of the situation and decided it was true and said it because it deserved to be said.

Nobody had said anything like that to me in fifteen years. Not since my father was alive. And even then it had been rare because he was a man who showed things differently, in the way he looked at you rather than the words he used.

I took a drink and set the glass down and looked at the window.

The plan had always been clean in my head. Take Nicholas's daughter. Keep her here. Let him come. Let him see. Grind him down slowly the way he had ground my father down, piece by piece, until there was nothing left for him to stand on. It had been clean and simple and I had never once doubted it.

But somewhere between watching her walk out of that ceremony and sitting across from her this afternoon while she told me she wanted in — not as a pawn but as someone choosing it — the clean lines had started to blur.

She wasn't what I had expected.

I hadn't expected her composure. Hadn't expected the way she listened or the way she pushed back or the way she had stood in that doorway and faced her father down without flinching. I had expected someone broken. Someone easy to manage. Someone who would stay in the room I gave her and be useful without complicating things.

She was none of those things.

I picked the glass back up and turned it in my hands and thought about that for a while.

The door knocked just after midnight.

Rhen came in without waiting, which meant it was something. He had a particular knock for bad news, two sharp ones close together, and I had learned to read it over the years.

He sat down across from me and leaned forward with his arms on his knees.

"Nicholas has been making calls," he said.

I looked at him.

"Since he left here this morning. He's been reaching out to three other Alphas — Harrow, Vance, and Castellan. All of them share borders with either your territory or his."

"What's he telling them."

"That Meira was taken," Rhen said. "That she's here against her will. That you went to the Silver Fang ceremony specifically to take her while she was vulnerable."

I was quiet for a moment.

"He's building something," Rhen said. "Not fast, not loud. Quiet. The kind of thing that grows if you don't cut it early."

"How far has it gotten."

"Harrow isn't biting. He and Nicholas have history, not good history. Vance is listening but hasn't committed. Castellan—" Rhen paused. "Castellan sent a message back asking for more information."

Castellan. I knew him. Careful man, calculating, the kind who didn't move until he was certain but moved hard when he did.

"He's the problem," I said.

"Yes."

I stood up and went to the window. The grounds outside were dark and still, the tree line just visible at the far edge against the sky.

Nicholas had moved faster than I expected. I had given him a day, maybe two, before he started working the edges. He'd done it in hours. That was the thing about men like him — they were never as slow as you wanted them to be.

"We need Meira visible," I said.

Rhen looked at me. "Meaning."

"The story he's telling only works if she stays out of sight. If nobody sees her, nobody can contradict him." I turned around. "She needs to be seen. In this territory, among my pack, comfortable. Not hidden away in the house. Out."

Rhen nodded slowly. "And she'll do that."

"She told me this afternoon she wants to be in it," I said. "Fully."

Something shifted in Rhen's face. "You told her."

"Some of it. Enough."

He was quiet for a moment. "And you trust that."

I looked at him. "She stood in that room and faced her father down without flinching. She came to my study two hours later and asked to be part of it on her own terms." I paused. "Yes. I trust it."

Rhen held my gaze for a second. Then he nodded and stood up. "I'll put together a list of events in the territory over the next two weeks. Things she could be seen at."

"Do that."

He left and I stood at the window for a while longer.

The timeline had shifted. What I had planned to do over months now needed to happen in weeks. Nicholas was moving and I needed to move with him, stay ahead of him, make sure the story he was building had nowhere to land.

Meira being visible was the first step. Her being seen here, settled, choosing this — that was the answer to everything Nicholas was telling those Alphas. Not words. Just her presence, out in the open, contradicting him without saying a thing.

I turned away from the window.

I thought about waking her up. Telling her tonight, not waiting until morning. She'd asked for the truth and I had told her tomorrow and tomorrow was still hours away but the situation had changed and she deserved to know that.

I walked down the hall.

Her door was at the end, the light under it dark. I stood outside it and listened. Nothing. She was asleep.

I stood there for a moment with my hand raised and didn't knock.

She was pregnant. She'd had the hardest day she'd had since she arrived here. She'd cried — I hadn't seen it but Cora had told me, matter of fact, the way Cora told me everything. She'd cried and then she'd washed her face and come to my study and held herself together and asked to be part of something that was only going to get harder.

She needed the sleep more than she needed the information tonight.

Morning was six hours away. Nicholas's calls weren't going to become a crisis before then.

I lowered my hand.

I stood there a second longer than I needed to and then I turned and walked back down the hall to the study and sat back down in the chair and picked up the glass.

Six hours.

Then I'd tell her everything and we'd figure out the next move together.